[NTLUG:Discuss] Fedora Core 2 Time/Date offset or reset

[Paul Ingendorf]

Interesting problem on Fedora Core 2 I thought I would post to the list as
it had me stumped for a few days.

While running fedora the time on my machine would reset to 5 hours before
the actual time.  I checked the hardware clock and it was set to localtime.
I checked the timezone and it was set to CDT.  I went though everything I
could think of to figure out why it would be behind like this and could not
figure it out so I ran ntpdate and updated the time with a timeserver to the
correct time.  The next day I checked it and again it was 5 hours behind.  I
was stumped after running through everything again resetting the time.
Today I came home from work and the time was again 5 hours behind.  This
time I began digging through files when I ran across adjtime which is
supposed to account for drift with the hwclock mine had been set to some
outrageous number changing it to 0 kept the time correct through the reboot.

One question I have is how did Fedora decide to set this for me as I never
specified drift for my install nor did I manually configure this file as I
used a different methodology entirely to maintain my system time.  I used
ntpdate and hwclock --systohw to maintain the hwclock.